Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Yes, despite all the to-ing and fro-ing going on here, I really am still knitting. I try to finish a row of Black Widow every day, although this past week's rows had so many P3 togethers--left slant (vicious!) I was lucky to get half-way around a single row in an hour.

I finished a pair of socks last week for Roy. Good airplane knitting.

The yarn is Cherry Tree Hill--I think the colorway is Green Mountain Madness. I love that yarn, but I swear the new stuff is heavier than the old stuff. I made a pair last year and that yarn looks to be about 25% finer than the newer skeins.

I bought the yarn shown below last year in Chiba. It isn't so wonderful, but it was apparently one of the only skeins of sock yarn in the entire country, so I snapped it up as a rarity.

It says it was made in Italy by a company named Diana, but it sure looks and feels like a Regia clone to me.

I have also been experimenting with seamless circular booties. Several experiments look fairly wearable and require no sewing, short rows, grafting or other painful contortions. I'll try to write out the patterns this week.

Speaking of this coming week, my friend Kyoko-san has organized a complex two-day yarn crawl across Tokyo. Between us, we located every yarn store in the entire city, and she has carefully mapped out our route to maximize in-store browsing time.

For such a large city, Tokyo has surprisingly few yarn stores. But I am really looking forward to Avril, which is the supplier for Habu. I promise to take pictures this time. Really.

The socks look great. I really love the color-way. The Regia clone even looks good to me though I can understand your wanting to find some good yarn stores out there. Good luck on the yarn tour and I hope you find wonderful stuff to bring home

Don't you love the name of that yarn? Of course I refer to a lot of yarns/patterns as 'clown prints.' Or was it crown prince? Is my monitor going? Yikes!On another note, I used CTH (Java) doubled for socks for my DH (boot socks for winter, while shoveling snow). Really liked working with it.